UK education start-up moves to Dublin after raising €1.3m

8 Jul 2013

A UK online engagement platform for higher-education lecturers and students called BlikBook is locating its headquarters in Dublin after raising €1.3m in venture capital. It will start with a team of seven but has plans to strengthen its team further.

The prime reason for BlikBook moving to Dublin was to take advantage of the high quality Irish graduate market and to focus on the growing Irish tertiary education market.

The funding round has been led by Leaf Investments, Enterprise Ireland and Delta Partners, which invested from its Bank of Ireland Start-up and Emerging Sectors Fund.

Existing investors Forward Investment Partners also invested in the round.

“With the highest proportion of graduates in the workforce in Europe, Ireland was an obvious choice for a company like BlikBook,” said Barnaby Voss, co-founder and commercial director of the company.

“The high quality of universities here means that there is a deep talent pool so we expect to be able to hire great people to help grow the business. Plus, the Irish higher-education market shares many characteristics with the UK’s, so universities here will be able to enjoy our platform as much as our existing customers in the UK,” Voss added.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com